The University of Ottawa has become the first university in Canada — and only the second in the world — to sign the Montreal Carbon Pledge, committing itself to calculating and publishing the total carbon footprint of its $2-billion investment portfolio.

The pledge, announced Monday, comes just a week before the start of the United NationsClimate Change Conference in Paris. It’s part of uOttawa’s existing commitment to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 34 per cent from 2005 levels by the year 2020

“We’re excited about this. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made,” said university president and vice-chancellor Allan Rock.

The University of Ottawa, like many other campuses in Canada, has been under increasing pressure to do more to battle climate change. Last month, a group of 90 current and retired professors signed an open letter demanding the university divest its endowment fund and pension plan of fossil fuel investments. In the letter to Rock and the board of governors, the group said that divestment “is not only morally necessary, but also financially wise.”

Making the Montreal Carbon Pledge “goes way beyond divestment,” Rock said. “It’s one thing to give up your holdings in oil companies — even assuming that has an impact — it’s quite another to look across the entire economy and say: ‘We’re committed to measuring and disclosing and reducing our carbon content in everything we do. The whole economy is in play, not just oil companies. It’s the entire portfolio and not just a part of it.”

The Montreal Carbon Pledge was launched in September 2014 as part of the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investment, which uOttawa has adopted. Its aim was to have at least $3 trillion in global assets assessed for their carbon footprint before the beginning of the Paris conference. To date, more than $8 trillion in global investments have been committed, said Stewart Elgie, a uOttawa law professor and founder of the Sustainable Prosperity research network.

The University of Ottawa has already cut 23 percentage points of its 34-per-cent greenhouse gas reduction goal through such things as installing charging stations for electric cars, giving transit passes to its students and improving energy efficiency, Elgie said. Its 34-per-cent target is double Canada’s national goal of a 17-per-cent reduction, he said.

Simply pulling the university’s investments from oil companies wouldn’t make much difference, he said. The largest oil companies are state-owned anyway, and for the others, universities are tiny players in the investment game.

“Just divesting from oil companies isn’t ambitious enough,” Elgie said. “To address climate change, we have to reduce demand for fossil fuels across the whole economy — energy, industry, transportation — all the sectors. As long as there is a growing demand for fossil fuels, they’ll keep being produced. Ultimately, we need to bring down the demand, not just block production. This means moving to clean technologies as quickly as possible.”

The only other school to make the Montreal Carbon Pledge is the University of California.

Meanwhile, the University of Ottawa board of governors is continuing to examine whether to drop its fossil fuel investments completely, Rock said. A decision on divestment is expected in the coming months.

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